DIY BALLROOM / LIVE

DIY BALLROOM LIVE

2007-8, outdoor public screen commission with live events

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DIY Ballroom / Live (2007-2008) was one of four projects commissioned by Cornerhouse, Manchester and BBC Big Screens for the first Bigger Picture National Touring Programme, alongside artists Juneau Projects, Esther Johnson, and Perry Bard.

Comprising a video/audio work and related live participatory events, DIY Ballroom / Live was launched with the Urban Screens Festival in Manchester and presented through a related conference and screening programme (10 – 14 October 2007). The work then toured to BBC Big Screens in Norwich (_enter, Aurora Festival, 10 November 2007), Leeds (17 November 2007), and Site Gallery, Sheffield (18 March 2008), with live events taking place in Manchester and Sheffield. The video/audio work comprised digital amateur footage of amateur ballroom dancers sourced online, while the live events brought these into relation with analogue, ad hoc gatherings of amateur dancers on the street. The video/audio work then alternated with a live camera feed of the live event. More recently, a version of DIY Ballroom featured in the exhibition, March 2012, at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2012.

DIY Ballroom / Live develops and expands on previous work engaging ideas around cultural dance, amateurism, migration, aspiration, the local and the international, as well as questions of the formation, duration, animation, and performance of archives. An earlier residency with the Media Archive of Central England sought to explore question of access, memory and narrative, through a performative encounter with the materiality and limits of a concrete, formal, recognised professional regional news archive (see NEWS and REEL, 2005). DIY Ballroom/Live emphasises the unlimited, immaterial, and comparatively ‘accelerated’ archive of informal, amateur footage accruing on the web. The work aims to engage both archival and performative impulses, notions of the temporality and spatiality of the archive, and the potential of ‘engineered spontaneity’ (see also Golden (Lessons), 2006). DIY Ballroom/Live is documented on two DVD publications, one produced and disseminated by Cornerhouse, the other by the Urban Screens Festival.